Home Office Backlash

Teleworking is back in the news!

The very technology that enables telecommuting and working from home could be destroying its value. Although productivity may increase in the short term, working from home may prevent your teams from working effectively.

I’ve had both office-based and home-office jobs, so I have an idea of the upsides and downsides of each. I last wrote about teleworking more than a year ago, when Yahoo first banned the practice. Here’s what I said at the time:

… the office is where I go to have impromptu conversations and face-to-face meetings, but it’s not where I am most productive, even with my headphones on. I am much more productive at home, in aeroplanes, or in hotel rooms without distractions.

I think the sort of togetherness that the Forbes piece describes is real. I work in a team that is entirely remote: no two team-members share an office. For the type of work we do, this works well. It’s great to meet up, and we take every opportunity to do so, but mostly we’re fairly loosely coupled, so we get on fine as is.

There is another dimension to consider here. If companies gather all their employees except for local field support into one central location, they may have all sorts of serendipitous conversations around coffee machines, but there is a significant risk of an echo chamber effect developing. Silicon Valley is all well and good, but what works there will not necessarily work elsewhere in the US, never mind Europe, Asia and so on. If everyone involved in deciding and communicating the strategic direction of the company lives their entire lives in Silicon Valley, surrounded by people doing exactly the same thing, the company will develop a huge blind spot to the realities on the ground.

Not to mention all the employees spending their bonuses on noise-canceling headphones just so they can get some work done in the office again…